With less than two weeks remaining, the 2nd City Council District election has turned into a contest of who is the outsider. Daily News.

In mailings, in robo-calls, in attacks on one another, businesswoman Chris Essel and Assemblyman Paul Krekorian, D-Burbank, have sought to portray each other as the “insider” who cannot be trusted.

To Krekorian, Essel is the “downtown special interest” candidate who has received endorsements from a number of City Council members, city employee unions and Controller Wendy Greuel, who was the council member of the district until her election last March.

Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa today begins a four-day trip to Mexico, where he will lead a delegation of artists to the 2009 Guadalajara International Book Fair. Daily News.

Thanks to a $2.1 million grant from the National Endowment for the Arts, more than 450 local authors, artists and filmmakers will display their work and perform at the festival, which runs for more than a week.

After Los Angeles police Capt. Kirk J. Albanese assumed command of Foothill Division six years ago, a Latino family called 911 to report a burglary. Dana Bartholomew in the Daily News.

The next day, 12 gang members in white T-shirts banged on their door warning them never to speak to police again. That same week, the gang terrorized a security guard at the San Fernando Valley’s only housing project.

So the new area captain pounced. Albanese dispatched four cops into San Fernando Gardens in Pacoima – 24/7. And ordered them out of their black-and-whites.

“I said, `You park your car at the community center and you get in it when you go home.’ They walked a foot beat 24 hours a day,” said Albanese, 54, now a deputy chief and commander of the South Bureau.